


Popular mechanisms for safety dreaming

by kumulonimbus



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Philosophy, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Watchpoint: Gibraltar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-11 02:38:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15962915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kumulonimbus/pseuds/kumulonimbus
Summary: “I dreamed I was a butterfly,”His voice is laced around his own artificial condition. Her humanity is the only piece of equipment that has a soul in that room. Yet she’s far from being alone – and she knows it.“Can you dream?”There’s a small nod that translates his ones and his zeros. His everlasting thirst for a real connection that requires no plugs.





	Popular mechanisms for safety dreaming

_“Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”_

Zhuangzi

 

**1:42 AM**

The monk has spent so many weeks in Gibraltar he could describe the nightly landscape of the watchpoint with his eyes closed as he floats peacefully from one room to the other – the quiet gym, already waiting for the brand new day to come, the deserted kitchen that rests after a busy night, the shimmering lights of the stars reflected on the tranquil, cold waters and the lonely scientist working overtime in the lab like every other night.

The sight does not differ that much from the sights he has seen all those other nights- botanical samples rest in cages, enduring the artificiality of controlled climates and adjusting to the antics of a world that’s going to get worse before it gets better. The computer offers numbers and calculations like solutions to a riddle no one can quite understand. And while the watchpoint sleeps, the scientist dresses up her exhaustion in yet another coffee and pretends she doesn’t see the monk that floats silently around the corner, like every other night.

Her hands wait on the table. There’s a dormant determination in that woman that has little to do with the ever-smiling optimist that sugar-coats her words for everyone to feel a little bit better.

“I dreamed I was a butterfly,”

His voice is laced around his own artificial condition. Her humanity is the only piece of equipment that has a soul in that room. Yet she’s far from being alone – and she knows it.

“Can you dream?”

There’s a small nod that translates his ones and his zeros. His everlasting thirst for a real connection that requires no plugs.

“Did you dream?” Zenyatta asks softly as he moves closer to the lackluster orchid spinning gracefully before him, “during all those years that you slept – did you dream about anything?”

The Chinese woman may know how to build ice walls to keep the world safe from harm. She may have what it takes to face the cruelest of blizzards and come out unscathed. But she doesn’t remember any of those dreams and the hurricane of borrowed fragments of imagination is not enough to fill a void that is meant to remain empty like a ravine.

“The things that I remember from my slumber…” her voice trails off with every passing second, “I’m not entirely sure if those were ever my dreams, to begin with…”

Her beginning seems blurry and painful. His ones and his zeros are not enough to meet her halfway. But when the scientist senses this brand new solitude as the monk begins to float away from her, she speaks again:

“Thank you for your company,”

They aren’t close. Not close enough to be friends. And she knows he has helped many in the past – but that’s a notion she’s not yet ready to dwell on. Does she need help? The optimistic, ever-smiling woman they know doesn’t seem to need any help.

“I see you working here alone every night,” Zenyatta comments, and stops near the door, “it’s really late – don’t you sleep anymore these days?” his words are a mess. Rewind. Erase. “You need to rest,”

The lonely woman shakes her head and her hands return to the cold table that stands right before her.

“If you see me working this late every night that means you don’t sleep either,” she whispers.

“I don’t need to sleep,”

He was born in a shoe box. His entire kind was. Scraps and pieces that hadn’t fit anywhere else. A shoe-box and an idea. His creator had done that much for him.

“I can’t sleep,” she finally opens up, “I have been sleeping for far too long. I can’t afford to waste any more time,”

She was born in a hospital. In a city. And had woken up in the warm embrace of her mother. Those rosy cheeks that look as if they still belong to a small child don’t seem to match the turbulence in her head. Silence stretches in the room – for the first time, it feels burdensome.

Her optimistic nature cannot define her now. The intrinsically ludic mannerisms of childhood have caught them in the middle – he’s so much younger than she is, yet he’s still scraps and pieces inside a shoe box. Her face doesn’t match her actual age. But there’s a warmth inside her that reminds him of the maternal arms he never felt. Childhood as a commonplace vortex, as a place they all have in common, as a private room filled with a common past where everyone eventually meets.

But only occasionally.

Outside looking in, the omnic realizes a shoe box is not a room. His ones and his zeros are not enough for him to meet her there and those maternal arms he has never felt around his silver frame still linger there, in the vacuum of his artificial loneliness.

He recognizes this so-called envy. He has felt it before. But her voice collects him from those distant, muddy waters, and brings him back to the reality of their night: it’s late, they don’t sleep, they’re both starving for something yet only one of them can actually eat.

“I never thought about my family,” she confesses, “when I woke up, when I understood I was the only one that had survived – Strike-Commander Morrison was the only one I could think of,” she turns around and faces the monk, expecting to see a reaction in his face – but his eyes and his mouth remain unaltered. His creator has done that much for him.

“He told me that the field was no place for a scientist,” she whispers, and a bitter smile tries to conceal this unburied pain, “I wanted to tell him that he was right, I needed to tell him that I was sorry – but when I finally returned, he was no longer with us,”

Metallic fingers land on her nearest shoulder.

“Morrison was a really brave man,”

“How can you know what brave means?” she asks, lowering her head. But the monk’s voice lingers on, even after his silence has wrapped up around her.

“How can I dream about being a butterfly?”

 

**3:06 AM**

She steps out into the small balcony and the truth becomes evident for the monk, as he watches Mei embracing herself, wrapping her arms around her waist – the discontent in her eyes, her tired lids fighting the wind: the woman hates this cold, she hates this wind. Yet she endures, alone, as Zenyatta watches her from a comfortable distance.

“Why do you expose yourself to something you don’t like?”

She looks over her shoulder, her lips curl into a wordless grin – what difference does it really make? And why would the monk choose to stay inside? He’s made of metal. He was born inside a shoe box.

“This is silly,” she shakes her head, “but I think this cold is already part of me – now I wouldn’t know how to live without it,”

The monk nods in silence and finally joins her outside. Down, near the rocks facing the bay and completely alone, the cowboy sits and faces the tranquil waters and the scientist can’t seem to be able to keep her eyes off him.

“There’s something about Jesse,” she muses to herself until the synthetic voice of the monk that’s keeping her company helps her remember she’s not alone. Not tonight.

“There are many things about him,” he says, “many people seem to agree on that,”

She looks sideways, trying to conceal her reddened cheeks in the darkness of the night.

“No,” the scientist whispers, “it’s not that kind of fascination,” her voice is soft, and her eyes are still glued to that melancholic man watching the ocean come and go in its glorious, intrepid dance, all by himself. When she speaks again her words flow from her mouth, but every letter lingers longer than usual, as one by one her sounds roll off her tongue. It’s like she’s asking for permission. It’s like she is waiting for some sort of sign to tell her that it’s okay to feel this way, that she’s entitled to this emotion. “I saw him without his prosthetic this one time – in his face, there was an expression of a pain he could not entirely feel – or was not supposed to feel – his free hand was caressing the empty space where his arm should have been,”

She doesn’t want to refer to him as an incomplete man, and the struggle inside suddenly becomes too real.

“Ever since that day, every time I see him I expect him to do that exact same thing,” she turns around, and finally faces the monk, “it must be terrible, you know? How can something that’s no longer there cause us so much pain?”

Zenyatta doesn’t say anything. He just nods, pensively, and relies on the expressions of a face that’s not as expressive as it should be.

“I know it’s miserable to find relief in somebody else’s pain, it’s petty.” She says, “but it makes me feel… a little less lonely,”

The man that faces the quiet waves rests his hat on a rock and the wind carries the song he’s humming. His melodies are always warm and soothing, even during this cold, dark night.

“More often than not, when I see or hear something that makes me laugh, I look over my shoulder, instinctively, and look for my brother Mondatta,” the monk confesses after a while, “waiting to find him there, laughing behind me – but then I remember Mondatta’s sense of humor differed greatly from mine and I realize my brother would have never laughed at any of the things that make me laugh… but every time I am awestruck or bewildered by something, I know he would have laughed at that – and the vacuum of his silence is somehow heavier and thicker than the sounds he could have made,”

Jesse’s song fades in the freezing wind and his cigar dies, trapped between his lips. He puts his hat back on, as artificial fingers dance before him – that same old pain, written all over his face, lingers on in his eyes.

“To miss something we lost, to miss someone that’s no longer with us – that is such a peculiar concept,” Zenyatta muses, “If Jesse still had his arm, we have no reason to believe said arm could cause him any pain… yet he still feels a pain that was only circumstantial. That ghost pain he still feels refers only to the end, it evokes only the last dramatic moments he spent with that arm, not all the years prior to that moment. The laughter I miss is the one my brother would never give… you say Jesse’s phantom pain makes you feel less lonely – but if instead of just watching him you would just go, and talk to him, you wouldn’t be alone,” he floats back to the lab, but the woman remains there, her arms on the railing, her eyes deconstructing the image of the nostalgic cowboy, “and his mind, possibly, could find a distraction in your company – a distraction that could make the pain go away, even if only for a little while,”

The scientist joins him inside the lab and sits on the table, still facing the bay outside that room.

“Do we have what we deserve?” she asks, “is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“We don’t have what we don’t look for,”

The clouds outside roar and lighting break the sky for a fleeting instant.

“There are things we can no longer look for,” she whispers, “there are things we lost forever,”

 

**3:52 AM**

As the scientist works, Snowball sleeps. Her companion replenishes its energy after a long day. The monk, still floating near the door, closes his eyes and begins to decompress – the closest thing he has to actual slumber, a peaceful state in which his body emanates warm steam, as his system cools down for the night. He emits a soft sound as his mechanism works its magic and the woman stops and looks over her shoulder.

This manufactured peace, she remembers this artificial dream.

The monk’s body shivers in a nearly imperceptible way. Her hand rests on his chest plate and there it stays, for a while, until her forehead comes to rest against his forehead and the woman closes her eyes.

The quiet rumble of his body seems to be able to contain the sounds of the sea.

He is a machine of dreams, or so it seems. Like the sounds of the sea, far away, calling her name from the distance. His heat, like a womb, and the soothing scent of the ocean coming from the rocky bay outside that room.

He opens his eyes, but he doesn’t move an inch.

“Waking up is always the hardest part,” he says, and her eyes find his, “isn’t it?”

 

**4:18 AM**

“You’re a machine,”

Her fifth cup of coffee tries to help her see things as they are. And it fails, miserably.

“I’m an entity capable of carrying a message of peace,” the monk offers, “but what I am, my own condition has been enough for war to tear, break and divide – I can help Genji, but I cannot fix my own brother. We are the very material that we are made of: skin and bones or scraps and pieces – there’s nothing more to us, we cannot be anything beyond the materiality that makes us who we are,”

“But still you dream about being a butterfly – and I can’t manage to remember the longest, most transcendental dreams I ever had,”

Outside, the monotonous chirps and whirrs of insects anticipate the storm and the cowboy disappears.

He shall take his melodies elsewhere.

 

**5:25 AM**

“Did you ever stop and wondered how the mind is always confusing our dreams, our oneiric projections, with the future, with a goal?” the monk asks and the woman nods, elbows on the table, hands cupping her own face.

“I remember the goal,” she’s quick to clarify, “but I just can’t remember the dream,”

She stands up, determined, her footsteps kill the distance that separates her from the monk. Then sits on the floor, right next to Zenyatta while Snowball dreams away.

“But aren’t those things meant to become the same thing, eventually?” she asks, even if her voice suggests she’s not exactly looking for an answer, “Maybe I was in that future before my time and so time itself froze, it stood still for a while until I…” her words die in her throat and the monk places his hand on her knee, but he doesn’t look at her.

“So now you’re a memento of the past living in a present that should have been your future?”

The scientist sighs, defeated.

“Maybe this was my own doing,” she says, “perhaps I got the exact thing I was looking for,”

He would like to know why his creator did not give him the opportunity to smile.

“Guilt,” the monk gives up, tangled up in his own absences and limitations, “so inherent to our species,”

They were programmed to feel sorry.

 

**6:00 AM**

The new day finds them where night has left them: sitting on the floor, with their backs against the wall. The watchpoint comes to life as the sun begins to wash its walls in the diaphanous lights of early morning, but while all the agents are still kissing away their dreams, there’s one set of footsteps that interrupts dawn with a rhythm the monk knows too well to ignore.

Short, hurried steps. Metallic. And determined.

“Does he sleep?” Mei asks, noticing Zenyatta’s attention already leaving the room and traveling down the cold watchpoint corridors alongside his troubled student.

The monk nods, but he doesn’t say anything. He can’t blame them – those eyes that are still unable to undress the humanity that lies hidden underneath the metal.

“I once saw a picture of him, I guess it was taken during his days in Blackwatch,” the scientist remembers, “back then, he would still show his eyes. Now he’s always wearing the helmet, he doesn’t take it off anymore,”

“And what did you see in those eyes? In that photograph?”

A black whirlpool of sorrow stained by an incandescent red she did not understand back then. Like a broken rainbow, or an omen to a sense of violence that even today, escapes her reasoning.

“Fury, anger, sadness… mostly sadness,” she offers, “He should show his eyes more often though – drenched in hurt or not, his eyes are still beautiful,”

“There was a time when he couldn’t tell nightmare from reality – he lived the nightmare, lived through it… but then, when he opened his eyes and woke up, he realized he was still there: living inside the nightmare,” Zenyatta says, “that body they have built for him is the nightmare, and the man is inside: he knows there’s no way out,”

“But he is out,” Mei retorts, “you helped him out,”

The monk shakes his head.

“Genji is still inside the nightmare – the only difference now is that he knows it.” He remembers the pain. He does. The comforting arms of a mother and the cold inside a shoe box, all blended together. “When Genji joined Blackwatch he ended up doing things that were pretty similar to all those things he never wanted to do with his family, in exchange of a chance to do things that were pretty similar to the things his own brother had done to him. Genji couldn’t see the nightmare back then, he couldn’t identify its borders,”

“But now he’s fine,” she breathes, “now he’s finally doing ok,”

“Because he accepted that the nightmare is never going to end,”

She can’t accept it. The optimistic woman in her refuses to accept it.

“But, seen that way, Genji’s life makes no sense at all,” she retorts, “He was born and raised inside the clan, an environment where a strong sense of loyalty and the need to belong are pillars. Plus, they were his family… he wanted something else, he wanted something different, he didn’t agree with them or their methods and that almost costs him his life. But the price for staying alive was to belong and be loyal towards an organization that operated in the shadows, just like the clan, doing things that were no different from all those other things he chose not to do with his own family – only for a chance to end the clan, and everything it represented… it’s more than just twisted, it’s more than an irony,”

“It’s an oxymoron,” Zenyatta helps her. “His whole life is an oxymoron,”

“But it’s just so hard,” the scientist whispers, “how can one live like that?”

“I’m afraid that’s a question only he can answer,” he pats her shoulder.

“I think it has to do with the fact that he chose not to kill his own brother, the person that hurt him the most,” Mei ponders out loud, staring into the monk’s eyes, “however, nobody could have said anything if he hadn’t forgiven his brother – it’s weird…”

“What is?”

“it’s like there’s no difference at all – Genji forgave his brother and it’s fine… but if he hadn’t, it would also have been fine. Hanzo was loyal to the clan, and he was capable of doing what he did.”

“Hanzo was the first to choose,”

“Yes, he chose to murder his own brother,” she fights back.

“No,” the monk retorts, “the perfect assassin was told to attack his own brother, but he chose to leave before finishing his job. He left him for dead, he assumed he had killed his brother – but, for whatever reason, he did not check that his brother was, in fact, dead,”

She shakes her head, “It makes no sense,”

“It makes all the sense – but it took them years to figure it out,”

“Figure what out?”

“That the Genji they knew was never going to survive that night,” the monk explains, “if Hanzo had refused to attack him, the clan would have killed him anyway. Hanzo stole everything from Genji that night – but he didn’t steal Genji’s final heartbeat. And that was a deliberate choice – by attacking his brother, by inserting Genji in a never-ending nightmare, Hanzo ended up creating a prison for himself.”

“Is that what justice is?” she asks, “he deliberatively chose to ruin his own life by not finishing his brother?”

“Justice is a social convention – just like love, loneliness, fame, redemption, honor and wealth, for example. The dreams and the nightmares we build for ourselves are ruled by all those concepts we create together as a society but those concepts, just like every other concept we know and live by, are mere abstractions. The dream and the nightmare don’t really exist – the never existed, and they never will,”

“But you dream you are a butterfly,” her head rests on his shoulder, and she closes her eyes.

“But I know I’m not a butterfly,” he says, “I know I can never be a butterfly,”

 

**7:46 AM**

Her head is still resting on his shoulder, and slumber finally finds her.

Snowball wakes up and, for a moment, the monk realizes that there’s a smile written all over those eyes. It’s a language of zeros and ones, exactly like his, but the monk perceives there’s something more human than robotic in that simple face staring back at him. Only eyes that glow bright and certain – no lips, no mouth. A touch of envy shakes his core from within and he closes his eyes and waits for the laughter that never comes.

Mondatta would have laughed, he knows.

Lucky Snowball for knowing its creator – for working alongside her and helping her.

Lucky Snowball, for being able to express every emotion so easily.

The monk touches his own face.

He still wants to ask his creator why he never let him smile. 


End file.
